Libre Paley's Blog: Libre Paley - Thoughts on Literary Erotica, page 19

Getting enough of the Write Stuff?

The national Observer newspaper in the UK recently ran a series called My Writing Day, where successful and critically acclaimed writers described their creative process in the course of a “normal” day. Presumably this is one during which they actually have time to sit and write rather than attend readings, signings, other marketing events, and so on. Their accounts provide a fascinating insight into the stops and starts, frustrations and occasional triumphs of getting work of literary merit...

Never mind the sex, feel the quality

Is there ‘good’ and ‘bad’ erotica? Broadly speaking no, I think (legalities and common moralities aside). Needless to say, it’s a matter of personal taste. I was recently interested in a Reddit discussion where one poster expressed impatience with any dialogue in erotica as a distraction from the main action, and another insisted that dramatic friction and relationships between characters was more important than the actual sex. Opinions on the balance of ratio of ‘sex versus story’ abound.

In...

Belief in passion

 

“I believe in passion. Nothing else. Two years, no more. All right then: three.”
So said novelist and playwright Francoise Sagan (Françoise Quoirez) when asked about her belief in love. This from a woman who admitted also to having “loved to the point of madness.” Her words exemplify the concept L’amour dure trois ans (love lasts three years), also the title of a novel by French writer and critic Frédéric Beigbeder. Well then, the notion that romantic (or at least sexual) passion has a pred...

Skip to ‘the good bit’

There’s a challenge in writing erotic literature: which should one emphasise: plot and character development, or ensuring plenty of the hot and sexy? Of course the writer can, and arguably should, provide both, perhaps depending on goals and marketing angle.

I noticed an algorithm on sale that throws this question into relief: the AI audiobooks service by Amazon’s Audible brand has a function called (without mincing words) “Take Me to the Good Part,” allowing the listener to jump straight to...

Many different shades

A few months ago I came across a comment by a literary agent, made back in 2016, expressing relief that the ‘fashion’ for publishing erotica was over. So I guess erotica is not to his personal taste then.

Hang on though, this guy was saying a genre that is hundreds of years old, arguably thousands, at least in visual form, is over and done with in text form? That it was all a fleeting fad?

By all the evidence, erotic art was created and appreciated by ancient peoples. Take for instance the fi...

Being Frank

Frank and I by Anonymous

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Here's one of those curiosities of Victorian and Edwardian erotic literature (technically Edwardian in this case, being published in 1902). In ‘Frank and I’, our 30 something, pleasure-seeking aristocratic narrator Charles is on the look out for young men to tutor and tame in accordance with his own proclivities. He encounters Francis - or ‘Frank’, whose minor crimes are an excuse for chastisement. A sound thrashing ensues… At which point, the first twist: ‘Francis’ is in fact more a ‘Frances’, a comely a teenage girl.
What follows is a very detailed, and yes, frank, account of the girl’s education in the sexual pleasures of corporal punishment in the course of Charles’ and Frank’s long-term relationship.
Graceful in its prose, the language and some of the activities on the book are nevertheless of a certain period. Not so much the sexual practices as the age of ‘Frank’, and the age difference between herself and the narrator Charles, who today would be regarded as a sexual predator. Scenes with those of an age that would today be considered minors may disturb the present-day reader. It unsettled me. Some of its descriptions reminded me of The Pearl, the late Victorian magazine “of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading”, though it is far better written.
Not sure if it’s a really a “classic” or just of a certain vintage.

I believe this has been filmed under the title ‘Lady Libertine’, but have not seen it.



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Monsieur by Emma Becker

Monsieur by Emma Becker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Interestingly, the central character Ellie and her older lover the 'mister' of the title come together through a shared interest in erotic literature. This novel starts out with much promise in the passionate carnal madness of a new affair. Ellie's sanity and sense of her developing self are challenged as she submits to her lover's dominant will. The erotic description is frank, raw and dark at times. The relationship between the lovers is well drawn in its complexity and the storytelling effective, making the reader fear for Ellie's sanity.
Unfortunately, for me, the novel was overlong and became repetitive, making me think it would have been better as a novella.



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Three by Julie Hilden: erotic but much more than erotica

Three by Julie Hilden (2003) is disturbing yet erotic. As the central couple, Maya and Ilan, travel through and negotiate the sexual rules of their marriage, the power balance queasily shifts. Newly-wed Maya sets out to please her husband physically, he being the more sexually experienced of the two, and finds within herself a need to be controlled. She becomes a participant in Ilan’s philandering through her involvement in the threesomes he arranges (on condition the women involved resemble Maya herself). When the experimentation proves arousing to Maya, alongside her writing career taking off, Ilan is the one left vulnerable and seeking a new form of sexual adventure, taking their sexual liaisons to erotic extremes.

Through the psychological twists and turns of their marriage and relationships with others, breakdown and calamity seem inevitable outcomes.

Erotic but much more than erotica, Hilden’s writing is sensual and evocative, leaving an impression on the reader after the last page has been turned. This makes for a compulsive read.

The sexual experimentation described in the novel is an integral part of a plausible relationship and its development. It may have been interesting to hear first-person accounts from both partners, inter-leaved or sequentially, Maya’s character and motives seeming much more developed than Ilan and whatever drives him, but that is a cavil.

Marco Vassi's The Saline Solution

The Saline Solution by Marco Vassi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I’d never heard of this or Marco Vassi before stumbling across a copy of The Saline Solution in a second-hand place, and thought the work would be a dated curio. I did not know, therefore, he was a critically admired writer of the (mainly) 1970s and ‘80s counter culture, one that produced works like this on matters of sexual exploration. All discredit to me.
A melancholy sometimes disturbing novel about the risks we take when we engage in casual sex outside established relationships, or an “affair of impersonal intensity,” and the dangers of sexual freedom. Not least, the aftermath when plans for an “unencumbered” affair go awry. The book is very much about sex even when sex if not taking place – its motivations, pleasures, dangers, and consequences. For all the bleakness, the sexual description is sensuous and liberated, and relief is provided by Vassi’s honed sense of the absurd.

It has made me want to give Vassi’s ‘The Erotic Comedies’ a try next before another of his novels.




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Shame died

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Lady Chatterley's Lover has such a reputation as "posh" (highbrow") erotica and such a freight of reputation and history - its obscenity trial in 1960, not to mention many 'steamy' TV and film adaptation s, that its hard to assess the novel along with its erotic content.
Its no longer going to cause a scandal, with its frank descriptions of sexual acts and interclass relationship, but is it erotica?
Mellor's - or Laurence's certainty of 'what women want' sexually can be patronising, though at least her Ladyship's pleasure is of central importance.
And of course, the novel is much more complex than its erotic scenes, not least themes of social division and gender conflict, women trapped by class expectation in loveless marriage, and set in a context of what war does to men (men rather than 'man') in the aftermath of World War I. However the sex scenes, the centrality of the female orgasm, the explicit even brutal language (forgiving such terms as 'maiden hair'), combined with emotional tenderness, and its deep sensuality are what stay with you after reading, baggage of reputation or not.



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